Pat Bywater: Huge arts harvest in the making

While big ticket programs and elected officials get a lot of the attention when it comes to plans to move Erie forward, the city's artists have quietly and consistently taken the lead.

Erie is harvesting an incredible bumper crop of public art this summer, a fact that bodes well for those who envision better days for the city.

Several significant projects have surfaced recently. They are:

• One of the biggest — literally — is a 12-foot-high, nearly 39-foot-long Ehren Knapp mural for Gannon University's A.J.'s Way, a walking path on campus between West Eighth and West Seventh streets. The mural is the culmination of a project started by English instructor Carol Hayes' honors composition class in fall 2014. Each class since has taken on a part of the project and moved it forward, also securing funding from the university's student government to make it happen. The piece features scenes that relate to the university's history and mission.

The students also interviewed muralists for the project and selected Knapp, a well-known Erie artist who has several murals up around Erie, including the eye-popping Erie Industry mural on West 12th Street just west of Myrtle Street.

Given its size and location on a well-used walkway, the Gannon mural seems destined to become a defining image for the university and generations of students to come.

No date has been set yet for the mural's official dedication, but Hayes thinks an event may be scheduled for Homecoming in early October. We'll let you know when plans are set.

• The First Presbyterian Church of the Covenant community recently completed its playground mural with the guidance of Tom Ferraro and Ed Grout. These two art activists have taken the process of rallying neighborhoods and groups around public art to a new level, and examples of their work can be found across the city. It's a wonder that the city and/or county hasn't already honored them with a designation of Erie public art laureates.

• And last but not least, Erie Art Museum graphic design interns Courtney Huebner and Quinn Thompson have created a self-guided downtown Erie mural and artistic bike rack tour. A printout detailing the walking or driving tour is available free online now to download under the "related content" link that appears with this story or at http://erieartmuseum.org/the-big-picture/. The tour complements the already-existing countywide mural Google map available at the same link.

The tour includes 11 murals, including Knapp's Erie Industry piece, and those with an interest in craft beers will be pleased to know that if they follow the tour in alphabetical order, they will end up at Voodoo Brewery on State Street, maybe sipping a selection from the latest batch while enjoying Simone Welch's new mural.

To further spur interest in the tour, "Eventually I would like to have these printouts available at local restaurants and breweries along the route," writes Ally Thomas, the museum's education coordinator.

These three efforts are in addition to projects I wrote about in June. Those are Mark Weber's St. Martin Early Care Center exterior mural, which many of you helped paint at the Erie Art Museum's Blues and Jazz Festival last weekend; Ashton James' glow-in-the-dark effort behind what is now a new State Street restaurant, Pepperoni Paulie's; and a west bayfront neighborhood effort led by Grout and Ferraro to put a mural on the exterior wall of the Martin Luther King Center’s West Third Street gymnasium. All three are expected to be done this year.

While big ticket programs and elected officials get a lot of the attention when it comes to plans to move Erie forward, the city's artists have quietly and consistently taken the lead. From them come a cornucopia of projects that bring residents together, breaking down barriers to communication, understanding and action, and that prompt viewers to reconsider their sense of this place.

Pat Bywater can be reached at 870-1722 or by email. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/ETNbywater.